Shawn Shieh writes: “As the People’s Republic of China approaches the 70th anniversary of its founding, we need to reflect on an important question and that is how to rebuild China’s civil society. China’s civil society has made significant progress over the last 40 years, but in the last 5-6 years, it has suffered a great deal and even gone backwards. China desperately needs to recover and rejuvenate the civil society that had been emerging in the early 2010s. More than ever before, China needs a capable, engaged and independent civil society and we need to be thinking now about how to achieve that.”